Why they’re so important to any democratically oriented organization

One afternoon, about 15 years or so ago, I was chatting with Amy Emberling, longtime co-managing partner of the Bakehouse. We were reflecting on the high level of collaboration we’ve built into the culture and systems of the ZCoB (Zingerman’s Community of Businesses) and how lots of conversations and connections happen here before any kind of big decision is made. We talk about things, gather diverse perspectives, review, revise, converse, and collaborate quite a bit before we take action. We do take action, of course. It’s just not done on a whim, or in a burst of emotionally fueled fury from an angry boss. Amy laughed, smiled, and said something like, “I really can’t even remember the last time I made a decision on my own!” 

She didn’t, of course, mean it in a completely literal sense. Clearly, we all make a myriad of small decisions all day. We decide what we’ll eat for dinner or if we’ll have another cup of coffee, how long we’ll read our book or what time we’ll head to bed. That said, I agree with Amy about how we do what we do here in the ZCoB: There are really no significant decisions that are made by just one person working completely on their own. Even in the most casual settings, there are always at least a couple of collaborative conversations about how to handle the situation at hand. And in anything bigger than that—product source changes, new guidelines for almost anything, big equipment purchases, menu changes, etc.—there will always be multiple chances to check in with others well before the decision is a done deal. 

In fact, I think it’s reasonable to say that most people, especially those in leadership, spend a good deal of their day checking with others to gather insight and ideas on the subject that’s on the table. All of the input is used to further enhance and better balance the impact of the decisions we’ll be making. It takes more time, for sure, but it leads to far more holistic and helpful decisions, decisions that have essentially been created by collaborative conversation, both formal and informal. It’s kind of like the “huddle in my head” that I wrote about last week, only in this case, the conversations are audible to all. I’m only sorry that Joey Ramone, who I also wrote about last week, isn’t here to help us find our way to the best possible decision. 

Historically, we really haven’t talked much about the philosophical import of “checks and balances” here in the ZCoB, but we have, I see now, been using a lot of these tools all along. And when we do our work well—whether that’s deciding to switch to the Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter at the Roadhouse and then the Bakehouse, open up Little Kim last fall, or approve Joanie Hales as co-managing partner of ZingTrain—it is in great part because we have used some of the hundreds of checks and balances we have in place. And that when we do make a decision, we’re ready for a little bit of the Ramones’ classic line “Hey, ho, let’s go!” 

In hindsight, I think it’s reasonable to say that effective application of checks and balances has quietly been one of the reasons we’ve continued to do what we do here at Zingerman’s in the way that we do it. We’re not perfect, of course, but checks and balances have helped us stay on course and true to our values. We’ve managed to do this when so many others seem to sell out or opt for short-term solutions and shiny objects that, over time, almost inevitably undercut the ethical integrity of their work. That’s why I believe that checks and balances are a key factor in helping us do what Joey Ramone said about the music of the band he helped start in 1974. To paraphrase him, we’ve always stayed true to who we are.

The impact of this work, I see a little more clearly every week, is far bigger than I ever would have believed. It’s not just which butter we use to bake our Sour Cream Coffee Cake. It has an impact on the community around us, and, over time, the entire country. I keep coming back to Wendell Berry’s wise words: “The leaders will have to be led.”

With all that said, here’s some of what I’ve been thinking about in recent weeks in this context: If we want a country that is governed graciously, with effective checks and balances in place, a good starting point is having our organizations do similar work. Big changes often start with small businesses. So hey, why wait? The more we create constructive, well-designed checks and balances in our workplaces, the healthier the ecosystems around us are likely to become. I believe we can do it. As Emily Ullman sings on the first song on her newly released album, Severe Clear, “If you expect the best, you get the best.” 

While checks and balances are in the news mainly because some people are trying so hard to get around them right now, I believe that they do not need to be an obstacle. To the contrary, when done well, they enhance creativity and collaboration while increasing inclusion. They help organizations, and the people in them, to work in more positive, empowering, collaborative, and creativity-generating ways. 

You may not have heard of Kim Scott. I can say honestly that I hadn’t until recently. We would all do well, though, to check out her work. In addition to being the author of Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity and Radical Respect; How to Work Better Together, she is the founder of the company Radical Candor. Aside from writing business books, Scott lives in Silicon Valley and teaches at Apple University. She once ran a health clinic for kids in Kosovo, followed by a diamond-cutting factory in Moscow. Needless to say, the Russian history major in me was intrigued by the latter. Perhaps even more intriguing is what she has to say about checks and balances.

In a March 2023 essay with the hard-to-pass-up title of “Here’s How to Stop Disempowering Your Employees and Start Creating a Cohesive Team,” Scott noted that many workplaces set the stage for top-down coercion by giving “managers up and down the org chart unchecked authority to make decisions that have profound consequences for their employees.” She added that it doesn’t have to be this way:

You can bake checks and balances—management systems in which leaders are held accountable for doing their jobs well rather than given unilateral decision-making authority—into your organizational design, or you can design a system that creates mini-dictators.

In my experience, people who are not actively involved in governance (which is, of course, most people) tend to think about checks and balances mostly in the context of the American Constitution. They’re obviously not incorrect. Checks and balances are clearly a critical component of trying to create a healthy country with well-functioning governance. I want to suggest, though, that well-designed and diligently used checks and balances are equally important—if far less often talked about—in the context of our companies. 

It’s not like organizations can’t operate without any checks and balances. There are many that work that way. Unless the unchecked leader is beyond exceptional, incredibly emotionally intelligent, and ethical to the core, the odds of things going well over time are low. We all miss things, and we all make mistakes. Checks and balances help to turn what could have gone way wrong into a regenerative right! I, for one, would not be doing what I do had I not benefited from some of the many checks and balances we’ve woven into the ZCoB. At an extreme, when leaders are allowed to be autocrats, they can make the kind of terrible, ego-driven decisions that Kim Scott is talking about. History is full of examples. It’s true in countries, but it’s equally true in companies large and small. When there are no checks on power, things will nearly always end up getting way out of balance. 

Autocratic leaders who lack any effective checks and balances on their decision-making power can wreak havoc or even go to war in a heartbeat—literally in the case of countries, figuratively in the context of companies. Since no one else has to sign off on their decisions, autocrats can essentially just authorize whatever it is they want to do and then do it. In fact, autocratic organizations are designed around the belief that the boss always knows best and should not be hindered by the flawed perspectives of others. To some, it sounds strong and decisive, but it is almost always dangerous in the end. Maria Alonso, writing in Forbes late last year, offered this: 

In any organization, leadership requires decisiveness, but when authority is unchecked, it can lead to environments that are unfair, toxic and even hostile. Leaders who fail to consider alternative perspectives or respond empathetically to challenges risk alienating their teams and fostering distrust. This dynamic can be particularly harmful in businesses, where the well-being and engagement of employees directly influence productivity and innovation.

Democratically oriented organizations, by contrast, are designed around the reality that nobody’s perfect. That we all—bosses, bakers, bussers, and corporate bigwigs alike—need help. That on our own, each of us will always miss important things. Conversely, when we tap into the wisdom of the group, we will do far better in the long run. As one member of the Ann Arbor-based Students for a Democratic Society said back in the ’60s: “Democracy is an endless meeting.” And sure enough, as per what I shared from Amy up top, on pretty much every issue of consequence, extensive ZCoB conversations precede action. People have a lot of autonomy to act, but hey, why wouldn’t you want a second or third or fourth opinion from someone you respect before you make any big decision? 

Even in an emergency, conversations can be convened quickly so that more people are involved within a matter of minutes. Here in the ZCoB, no one will just decide to do something drastic and then do it. In great part that’s because there are always effective checks and balances in place. As an example, we do not fire very many people here, but when we do, no one can be terminated without a member of our Department for People (aka HR) or a managing partner present. Terminations are always done by at least two people together, never one of us on our own, and always after many conversations with our HR folks. It’s a small thing that is used relatively rarely, but still, it can keep some really big problems from happening! 

There are, I see now, a lot of checks and balances in the world that I had never consciously considered but that we work with freely. As anarchist anthropologist and author David Graeber shows:

[P]rocesses of egalitarian decision-making … occur pretty much anywhere, and are not peculiar to any one given “civilization,” culture, or tradition. They tend to crop up wherever human life goes on outside systematic structures of coercion.

And, sure enough, now that I’ve been paying attention, I realize that checks and balances are already all around us, even if we don’t usually think of them as such. To wit: Quarterbacks have coaches. Classrooms have teachers. Writers have editors. We all drive on roads with speed limits. And many of us live in houses. In his song “Bobbie’s House,” Jeremy James Meyer sings:

So I’m building a roof
For my soul to dwell
Cause my home needs protection
I’ve got staying power

Meyer’s lyrics led me to wonder if the roof on a home is a check on the weather, one that allows us to lead better and more balanced lives. Poet Gary Snyder’s excellent tome The Etiquette of Freedom also reminds me that nature knows checks and balances quite well:

Social order is found throughout nature—long before the age of books and legal codes. It is inherently part of what we are, and its patterns follow the same foldings, checks and balances, as flesh or stone. What we call social organization and order in government is a set of forms that have been appropriated by the calculating mind from the operating principles in nature.

Checks and balances are also, of course, in the Bible. One of the most fascinating and intriguing examples is the Sabbatical year. Every seven years, debts were supposed to be forgiven. It was meant to rebalance economics in the community, prevent excessive accumulation of wealth, and help out those who were struggling to get by and had borrowed money to keep going. It’s an inspiring Biblical directive that, interestingly, seems to be ignored in most modern settings. 

Looking back on our nearly 44 years of history at Zingerman’s, I realize now that we’ve been both checking and balancing, in a sense, since Day One. Even when we only had two employees, Paul (Saginaw, of course) and I were working together to make any meaningful decision by consensus. We came to agreement—often after a lot of disagreement—or we didn’t act. Since then, the list of checks and balances has grown longer. While it may not be an approach for the autocratically minded, it is pretty clearly working for us.

The desire to weave checks and balances into our work, the sort of beliefs that Paul and I both had back at the beginning, is not unique to us. It’s a very different belief system than many organizations have, though, one that encourages humility and collaboration in the interest of everyone coming out ahead and succeeding together. In her recent enews, Dana Margolin, leader of the British band Porridge Radio, wrote:

Everything in the room is defined by everything around it in the room that is not it. If you spend enough time looking at all the empty spaces around everything in the room, you start to notice all the empty spaces around yourself that make you up. The empty room around me is as important to the physical space I think of as myself as the little bits that are touchable that I also think of as myself. That makes me know more about my place in the world.

Margolin’s beautifully written observation is one that comes from someone inclined to collaboration and the quality improvement that comes from well-designed and caringly used checks and balances. Someone with an autocratic mindset, by contrast, is the inverse. Their ego fills the room, they have all the answers, and checks and balances are only an obstacle put in their way by “less competent” colleagues. It’s Dana Margolin’s approach that I’m advocating here, of course. Well-designed and thoughtfully applied checks and balances come with several benefits:

• They make sure that we all come up with the best answers we can.
• They’re a systemic way to actualize and benefit from diversity.
• They help us avoid making rash, bad, or deeply destructive decisions when we’re caught up in an emotional reaction.
• They encourage us to accept limits that may feel restrictive, but I believe they’re actually regenerative contributors to our ecosystem’s health.
• They’re an important element of making any kind of inclusive, democratically oriented organization work. Without them, decisions are often made by bosses who get really excited or angry and then act in response to these feelings without really thinking through the implications of their actions. I’m all for emotion, but it is best when it’s balanced by the diverse inputs of others. 

People do need to have good intentions to use checks and balances. Those who don’t care or who are acting out of malice just work hard to figure out how to fake their way past them. It takes an ethical organization or community to keep checks and balances in active and effective use. In a 2024 interview on the Live at the National Constitution Center podcast, author, political commentator, and chair of Princeton’s Department of African American Studies Eddie Glaude Jr. offered:

We have to cultivate the cognitive virtues of being open to deliberation, of being willing to understand when we’re wrong, to engage in a kind of experimentation with regards to matters, right? So cognitive virtues that allow us to be open to growth, right? As well as kind of emphasizing notions of courage. Of being caring and tending towards others.

I’ll add something to that: Checks and balances won’t work if you don’t believe they have a benefit. They definitely don’t work well with people who see checks and balances as a pain in the ass that they need to figure out how to get around. The author of Small is Beautiful, E.F. Schumacher, writes that “Gandhi used to talk disparagingly of ‘dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.’” There are, of course, no such people. When people’s main goal with agreed-upon checks and balances is determining how to get around them, they will almost certainly find a way. 

Here at Zingerman’s, there are a whole host of things that I now see are healthy, equity- and dignity-based checks and balances. Here are a few:

1. Paul and I working by consensus: Right from the get-go in 1982, Paul and I quickly agreed that if we weren’t able to come to an agreement as partners, we wouldn’t take action.

2. Expecting consensus from other partners: In 1994, when we rolled out the Zingerman’s 2009 Vision, we extended that same agreement to all the new managing partners. Neither they nor we, no matter how big a share of the business we owned, would act on something without consensus from all of the other partners. The model, we knew then and know now, is not a good one for people who just want to do what they want to do without input. 

3. Leveraging the tension of businesses operating both together and independently: When creating the 2009 Vision, we built in tension between our overarching organization (the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses) and our semi-autonomous businesses. Each essentially checks the other. Instead of having a typical corporate headquarters tell everyone what to do, our businesses will constructively check the shared services team and vice versa.

4. Introducing our Training Compact: Put in place in 1994, this compact gives 100% of the responsibility for the effectiveness of the training work on both the trainee and the trainer. In other words, both the trainer and the trainee are turned into checkers and balancers, each guiding the other to get to a successful training session. 

5. Building consensus into Partners Group decision-making: In 1994, we moved responsibility for running the ZCoB to our newly formed Partners Group. The group began as seven or eight people—me and Paul and some managing partners. Today, there are 22 people. The consensus model Paul and I had used together since 1982, became, more formally, the model we use in the Partners Group. They approve things like new businesses, new partners, the ZCoB benefits plan for the next year, changes in organization-wide policy, and new long-term visions for the organization. Again, those decisions are made now by 20-plus people. Yes, it can be frustrating for anyone who’s ready to get going, but it helps us get to better outcomes in which we are all really on board. 

When we made this move for the bigger group to adopt consensus-based decision-making, it meant that Paul and I willingly gave up the chance to operate without any real checks on our organization-wide work. Yes, we were important, but the Partners Group (of which we were a part), not “Paul and Ari,” made the big decision. As I tell doubters all the time, Paul and I have not been in charge of the organization since 1994! We are only two voices. I’m not saying we’re irrelevant—only that we gave up the chance to just do what we want as co-founders without getting full consensus from the other partners.

6. Bottom-Line Change: For 25 years, we’ve been using this organizational change recipe, which globally recognized writer and leadership coach Verne Harnish regularly refers to as the best he’s ever seen. This recipe (aka framework) for change is all about good checks and effective balances. It’s designed to bring more people into the conversation before a decision about change is made. In the process, we tend to take into account issues autocrats will almost certainly have ignored. (Far more can be found in the pamphlet “Bottom-Line Change.”)

7. Incorporating staff partners into decision-making: By putting four folks who are not managing partners into our Partners Group and having them be part of the consensus, we add diversity and increase the odds of someone stopping something from going forward without considering the needs of the majority of the people who work here. Each of their voices counts as much in the Partner Group consensus as mine!

8. Embracing open-book management: Thirty years into using open-book management, I can see that it absolutely serves as a check and a balance. Busboys might ask about the balance sheet. People in one business wonder why another is getting the results it is. Everyone who’s interested can see the info.

9. Holding open meetings: By defaulting to having our meetings open, we’re more likely to get a diverse group of people and perspectives in the room, and the likelihood that someone will speak up and voice a different view is greater. It is often an informal but effective check and balance on our work. 

10. Creating our Stewardship Council: This is a five-person group of managing partners (I‘m one of the five) who are filling the role Paul and I filled since 1994—leaders among leaders. While all the managing partners are deeply committed to, and care about, the organization, the Stewardship Council members are committed to spending a significant percentage of their time working on the whole organization. This provides both formal and often informal checks on what managing partners might otherwise do (or not do) when left to work on their own, alone.

11. Using meeting facilitators: The facilitator in our meetings essentially serves to check those who tend to speak more and better balance the conversation to bring out the voices of those who might tend to hang back.

12. Having shared services: Our Department for People (aka HR), Finance, Creative Services, and other teams that serve all ZCoB businesses help keep our ethics, legal obligations, and internally agreed-upon expectations in place.

13. Having three bottom lines: Our three bottom lines are Great Food, Great Service (to each other and the community as well as guests), and Great Finance. The checks and balances happen pretty naturally in this setup. If one bottom line starts to get overemphasized, it’s almost inevitable in an open organization like ours that someone will speak up to advocate for the bottom line that got lost. Rebalancing begins.

14. Clearly defining quality: Everyone who’s worked here for more than a couple of weeks will likely know that our definition of quality at Zingerman’s is a) full-flavored, which we further define as “balance, complexity, and finish,” and b) traditional food. This is not about keeping products out of the ZCoB, per se. Rather, it offers a sense of calm confidence for anyone who works here that they, too, can learn to assess quality without having to wait for some hierarchical boss to pronounce something “good enough.” 

15. Establishing our perpetual purpose trust: This freely chosen check and community-minded balance prevents Zingerman’s from being sold and selling its soul in the process. Here’s much more I wrote about it. Email me at [email protected] if you’d like to know more.

Checks and balances do not need to be done in a dictatorial way. Sometimes, doing better systems-design work puts a check or balance in place in an ecosystem-aligned way that is very effective but that hardly anyone notices. In that regard, I realize now that all of our frameworks are essentially freely chosen checks and balances. They guide us toward better decisions while still requiring each of us who uses them to think things through pretty effectively. It’s hard to imagine someone going radically off course while giving their all to living the 3 Steps to Great Service, trying to practice dignity, or using the Six-Pointed Hope Star, and so on.

In his wonderful forthcoming book, Flourish, Dan Coyle shares the story of a Dutch engineer named Hans Monderman, who did some wonderfully creative work to check and (re)balance traffic. In 1982, Monderman was in his late 30s and living in Holland, while we had just opened the Deli here in Ann Arbor. He was assigned to work on a traffic problem in the small town of Oudehaske. As is true of many European towns, Oudehaske is relatively small, but still located along a fairly major roadway. Which means that high-speed motorists need to slow way down when they get to the edge of town. All kinds of warning signs had been tried, but to no avail. Drivers simply sped on through, risking lives in the process. Monderman’s approach, later dubbed Shared Space, was counterintuitive to most of his colleagues. Rather anarchistically, he opened up the traffic space entering the town, creating a wide, flat, unmarked area. Because every driver needed to figure out what was coming at them and from which direction, they all slowed down, on average by about 40%. Fewer formal boundaries, better results, more self-regulation, and accidents were reduced in the process! Wow!

Another example is the ZCoB’s ritual of ending every meeting with what we call “appreciations.” It’s a totally voluntary, “Quaker-style” sharing of gratitude by anyone present for anyone anywhere. They are, I just realized this week, a great example of a regenerative check and balance. They remind us in every meeting to return to a place of gratitude before we get into the rest of our day. After critical, even tense, conversations, they get us back on an appropriately appreciative track before we break up our gathering.

There are also checks and balances that we can impose on ourselves. To wit, Paul taught me early on to never act in anger. It’s a great guideline. By all means, be angy—just don’t act while I’m angry. Another simple one I made for myself is committing to smiling when I’m writing an email. It’s a check that pushes me to stay positive, polite, and dignity-focused rather than dash off a note in frustration.

Part of having effective checks and balances in an organization is that if we don’t hold ourselves accountable for actually using them, well, they won’t work. Which means that often my role as a leader (or that of other leaders here) is to say stuff like, “We really should slow down and use Bottom-Line Change to roll this out properly,” and “This decision really ought to be discussed in an open meeting so more people can be part of the conversation. Let’s pause and put in the agenda for next month’s ZCoB huddle.” It’s not always fun or easy to do this. When momentum is pushing people forward and they’re ready to get going, it’s not much fun to feel like I’m the one holding them back. I remind myself, though, that it’s not me—it’s the checks and balances that we had already agreed to use. That is the work that needs to be done. As Kim Scott says:

Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off. You have to accept that sometimes people on your team will be mad at you. In fact, if nobody is ever mad at you, you probably aren’t challenging your team enough.

Does all this really matter that much? I believe so. My sense is that checks and balances are a far bigger deal than most of us might imagine. Grace Lee Boggs, writing in The Next American Revolution, puts all of this in context:

All over the planet more and more people are thinking beyond making a living to making a life—a life that respects Earth and one another. Just as we need to reinvent democracy, now is the time for us to reimagine work and reimagine life. The new paradigm we must establish is about creating systems that bring out the best in each of us, instead of trying to harness the greed and selfishness of which we are capable. It is about a new balance of individual, family, community, work, and play that makes us better humans.

Which is exactly, I believe, what thoughtfully designed, caringly crafted, and purposefully used checks and balances can do when used regularly. 

There is, of course, no perfect way to do this work. Each ecosystem will need to design its own checks and balances. Take a bit of time this week to check in on what checks and balances look like in your life. Let me know what you learn. Our collective future may hang in the balance!

Build balance into your systems

A lovely combo of roasted butternut squash, sautéed spinach, and anchovies

While we wait for spring to show up, try this lovely warm salad that, around Ann Arbor at least, can be made using locally grown vegetables that we can still get during the depths of the cold months. It has been one of my favorite things to make in recent months! Anchovies and squash may sound like a strange combination, but the sweet/salty/savory blend of flavors comes together beautifully. If you want to skip the anchovies, you could make the salad with a really good feta cheese! Or, if you want to go wild, use both!

To make the salad, peel a good-sized butternut squash and remove the seeds. Cut into 1-inch cubes. Toss with extra virgin olive oil, sea salt, and freshly ground black pepper and then roast in a 400-degree oven for 30 to 40 minutes, until the squash is very tender and golden brown on the outside. I stir it partway through to encourage even cooking. When the squash is nice and tender, remove the baking dish from the oven and set it aside.

When you’re ready to eat, wash a bunch of fresh spinach and pat it dry. Sauté it in hot olive oil. Add a pinch of sea salt. If you like garlic, add a clove that’s been peeled and bruised.

When the spinach is soft, remove it from the pan and place it on the bottom of a platter or a series of salad plates. Mound some cooked squash on top of the spinach. Squeeze the juice of a small orange over the top and then dress with a good olive oil, plus more salt and pepper to taste.

Arrange anchovies on top—I’m a big fan of the ones we get from both Fishwife and Ortiz! Grate some zest from the orange peel on top of the salad for aroma, color, and flavor.

Eat and enjoy!

Tuck into some tinned fish

Why I wish I’d known Joey Ramone and other imaginative oddities

On the rather foggy, drizzly, and gray afternoon of Monday, October 5, 1981, the Ramones were signing album covers at Schoolkids Records, the classic Ann Arbor shop that inspired the name of the #38 sandwich at the Deli. The band’s latest LP, Pleasant Dreams, had just been released in the third week of July, so the four musicians were actively touring, as they often did throughout their 32 years together. There are some great black-and-white photos of the signing, shot by Robert Chase, who I happened to see at the Coffee Company this past Sunday!

Later that evening, the band played at the Second Chance on Liberty Street, just up the block from Schoolkids. Tickets were $9.50, and the show was scheduled to start at half past nine. It was the Ramones’ fifth Ann Arbor appearance. They’d played the Second Chance regularly ever since their first record debuted in 1976. For that first show, in late March of 1977, they opened for Fred “Sonic” Smith’s Rendezvous Band. John Carver, Second Chance owner and a regular at the Roadhouse all these years later, reported that the Ramones requested $400 and a bag of cheeseburgers as their fee. The photo above is a drawing the Ramones made for John, done for his October 5 birthday at the time of the 1981 show.

Writing in The Michigan Daily the day of that first Ann Arbor gig in 1977, David Keeps called the Ramones a “New York-based, Benzedrine-powered powderkeg.” The week after the show, Keeps authored a wonderful review, calling the band “Undeniably the loudest, fastest band around.” And 25 years later, Elizabeth Hill wrote another Michigan Daily story about the band. She noted that they used a simple formula: “Four chords, four guys, same last name and no song over two minutes.” It was uncomplicated, but no one else had ever done it. And although it may sound easy, in practice, playing that way was anything but.

I didn’t attend the show that October evening, but I already owned all of the Ramones’ first four albums and had spun them on my turntable at home many hundreds of times. While the band was high on my listening list, I had other issues on my mind that month. I hadn’t said anything about it to more than a handful of people, but I’d spent the summer and early autumn of 1981 considering whether or not I ought to leave my job as a kitchen manager at Maude’s. The work, pay, and people were perfectly fine, so there was really nothing wrong with it, and I’d been with their organization for almost four years. Over time, though, the work had begun to feel less and less inspiring. I was totally into food and cooking, but I had a growing sense that where the organization was headed, though it was a well-accepted and oft-followed path for mainstream business growth, was not a place in which I wanted to spend my life. Quite simply, the work was not the soul-filling type that I intuitively, if still kind of subconsciously, knew I wanted.

Three weeks later, on November 1, 1981, perhaps in an unconscious acknowledgement of the Ramones’ punk spirit, I gave two months’ notice at Maude’s. I was completely unclear on what I would do next. Two days later, Paul Saginaw, then my friend and soon my business partner as well, called me: The little two-story brick building across the street from his existing business, Monahan’s Seafood Market (co-owned with Mike Monahan), was going to be available. Paul and I had worked together in the restaurant a few years earlier, and he thought the two of us should go check out the space. The time seemed right, he said, to open the deli we had talked about off and on over the nearly four years that we had known each other. Less than five months later, on March 15, 1982, we opened Zingerman’s Deli. It was the culinary equivalent of starting our own band. Given our very small opening budget and down-to-earth approach, we did it in a pretty punk way. I didn’t realize that at the time, but thanks to this reflection on the Ramones, I do now. As Kirk Hammett of Metallica later said of Joey Ramone: “He ignored all the trends. He didn’t follow anything. He set his own trend.” We were always intent on doing it our own way, and we still are today.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve found myself wishing that I’d known Joey Ramone. Not because he was a rock ’n’ roll star or because I loved the band’s music—that’s what would have drawn me to Schoolkids to get a signature back in 1981. Today, it’s still fun to listen to the music and watch clips of the band playing live. I like to see Joey’s one-of-a-kind stage presence in action. Elizabeth Hill, writing in The Michigan Daily 25 years ago this spring, described 6-foot-6-inch Joey as towering over everyone else, “staring behind his trademark shades and black curtains of hair” as he “belted out countless punk songs at a breakneck pace, sometimes ballistic, sometimes bubble-gum.”

All that said, my interest now is centered much more on Joey Ramone’s philosophical and artistic inspirations, his emotional intelligence, his joy and generosity of spirit, and his intellectual insight. I have a feeling that if I had known Joey Ramone in 1981, he’d have told me to quit my corporate job long before I had the courage to do it. I also think he’d have encouraged me to find something much more aligned with what the Ramones were all about—being themselves in unique and wonderful ways. As Joey used to say:

To me, punk is about being an individual and going against the grain and standing up and saying, “This is who I am.”

Earlier that year, in July of 1981, by coincidence (or maybe not), the Ramones released a song called “This Business is Killing Me.” I can only smile now as I think back on it. I wasn’t yet in a mental place where I was consciously looking for song lyrics to inform my life, nor was I self-aware enough to notice that I was doing work that was fine but not hugely fulfilling or as fun as it once had been. Fortunately, I gave notice that fall anyway. Paul called, we quickly concurred, and after about four months of renovation and preparation, we opened. For many years now, I’ve been fortunate to be in a business that enlivens me and is pretty darned true to who I am.

Fast-forward 44 years to late in the fall of 2025. It was a few days after publishing a piece about the amaZingness of the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (or the ZCoB in what we call Zinglish) huddle. I had sort of a strange thought.

As those who know me well are well aware, odd-sounding ideas are not uncommon for me. Some sound good when I think of them, but I quickly let them go after further reflection. This one, though, I really liked. Strange as it sounded when I first said the words out loud, it still seemed to make sense as I thought about it more. Not surprisingly, though, within a day or so, a couple of critical voices began to kick up in the back corner of my mind, telling me to forget the whole thing. They dismissively implied that I was wasting my time and that the idea at hand—or, more accurately, in my head—was way too wacky to be writing about, let alone acting on.

For a few days, I listened to those negative voices, setting the idea aside while I engaged with the myriad other things I have on my mind. Still, though, the idea continued to resonate. Fortunately, those critical voices that have been with me for most of my life are not the only ones I have in my head. Now, 44 years and a few months after the Ramones played that gig here in 1981, I have a whole host of positive voices that come into my internal conversation to get it back on track.

One of them is Hugh MacLeod, the Scottish author of the highly recommended Ignore Everybody. I’ve never met Mr. MacLeod in person, but I’ve read—and then reread half a dozen times—his book, underlined it extensively, and internalized much of his inspiring and insightful message over the years. MacLeod has much wisdom to impart, including this lovely line that I know now to be both accurate and super helpful: “Good ideas are always initially resisted.”

To wit, when the Ramones played their first shows together, they were almost universally panned by the music press. They were often described as “aliens.” Per MacLeod’s insight, though, the critics turned out to be totally wrong. The band’s 14th and final album, Adios Amigos, was released 30 years ago this past summer, and they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

For years, I took MacLeod’s words to mean that when I introduce a new idea into the organization, there will always be resistance, and that I should not let the resistance keep me from advancing something that I believe to be true in my gut. Last week, though, I had what Stas’ Kazmierski—former ZingTrain co-managing partner, the man who taught us visioning and bottom-line change, and someone whose voice I’ve internalized—taught me to call a “belated glimpse of the obvious.” The resistance to good ideas that MacLeod is writing about is not restricted to what others have to say about our suppositions. The same sort of resistance happens inside our own heads, too.

MacLeod’s wise words are always helpful! And happily, he is not alone in his encouragement. Stephen Pressfield’s voice has become fairly well ensconced in my head over the years as well. As he wrote in his terrific book The War of Art:

Resistance really takes the shape, for me, in voices in my head telling me why I can’t do something or why I should put it off for another day, procrastinate for another day.

…

Resistance is experienced as fear. … [T]he more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul.

In this case, having learned what I’ve learned over the years, I can let my critical voices speak their minds negatively but not give in to what they are calling for. MacLeod and Pressfield, I’m happy to say, won the metaphorical day.

So, pray tell, what’s the odd insight? In the Ramones’ world, putting forth this insight could be considered the release date—the first sharing of something new with the world, or my world at least. It’s not as exciting as the first Ramones record back in 1976, but this new idea has had my mind abuzz. It’s the realization that, much like we have our regular huddles at Zingerman’s, including the big ZCoB huddle I’ve written about recently, I have a huddle going on in my head. No one else can see it, but I know now that’s in there. 

As with the ZCoB huddle, the quality of the huddle in my head is determined by:

1. Which voices are present, which ones speak up, and which ones are heard
2. How well the gathering is facilitated by me (or you, if it’s your huddle)

How effectively that internal huddle runs makes an enormous difference in how well I lead. This is also true for the relationship between the ZCoB huddle and our organizational health. Meeting quality, quite simply, matters more than most people realize.

Singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (whose 1977 album Death of a Ladies’ Man was produced by Phil Spector, who later produced the Ramones’ 1980 release, End of the Century) once said, “The voices in my head, they don’t care what I do, they just want to argue the matter through and through.” That sounds a lot like how I spent the first 30 years or so of my life. Lots of voices, lots of chatter, very often not very constructive, all having at it in my head and all talking at pretty much the same time. In hindsight, I’ve realized that when I experienced hard times, mental chaos, anxiety and confusion would always follow. Knowing what I know now, the sound inside my mind must have been something akin to listening to five separate Ramones songs simultaneously. The volume and pace are high, but very little constructive material comes out in the chaos and confusion.

By contrast, if we learn to manage the voices in our heads well and get the right voices in the room, the whole thing can be a much more productive experience. An experience that, when it’s working well, is akin to the kind of beauty, insight, dignity, grace, and collaboration that I witnessed in the ZCoB huddle a few weeks back and then wrote about afterward.

Why would all of this matter? Because, quite simply, the quality of the conversation in our heads is manifested in the quality of everything else we say, decide, and do in our lives. As I wrote in Secret #38, “Thinking About Thinking,” the way we think is, often unconsciously, the way we work! And the more positive and insightful voices we have in our heads, well, I’m pretty sure the more positive and insightful our work is going to be.

While I’ve loved the Ramones’ music for many years now, I knew next to nothing about Joey Ramone other than he was very tall, cool, and a one-of-a-kind punk rocker. The last few weeks have changed that. Having spent some time getting into his life story and worldview, I’m absolutely going to invite him to my internal huddle. Joey Ramone had the sort of ethical voice I prefer to surround myself with. As he explained, what drove him was punk: “I want to be my individual self. Doing it your way. Your own principles. You’re going against the rules, so a lot of people may turn on you.” Joey Ramone demonstrated that you can live in ways that are aligned with your values anyway. As he said later in his career, “We always stayed true to what the Ramones are.” I certainly hope that that’s what folks will one day say about what we do at Zingerman’s!

Joey Ramone, born Jeffrey Hyman in 1951, grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Forest Hills, New York. He was diagnosed with OCD early on. In those days, there was very little good support, and he struggled with deep insecurity. His mother would later say, “He was quiet and shy. He wasn’t like other kids. He was a loner. The projections for him were not good. He was a slow student. But he was highly intelligent.” A young Jeffrey was apparently quite geeky, always super tall and skinny, and was regularly pushed around by the tough kids in his high school. Fortunately for us, the “highly intelligent” won out over the other issues, and the kid who would later become Joey Ramone persevered. He started playing drums at 13, and he was a big fan of the Stooges, David Bowie, The Who (in 1994, the Ramones recorded a cover of “Substitute”), and many other artists. In 1972, he became the singer in a glam-rock band called Sniper. And then, in 1974, he co-founded the band that famously became the Ramones. Soon Jeffrey Hyman became Joey Ramone.

In the spring of 1976, the band released their first album, The Ramones. I bought a copy, almost certainly at Schoolkids, shortly thereafter. It was—and still is—awesome. At the time, I just liked the music. I didn’t understand contextually or intellectually exactly what the Ramones were doing with music and why it was so hard to pull off—all downstrokes, barely ever taking a break between songs, playing and singing faster than anyone else around.

The Ramones were definitely far more than just another band. According to Andy Schwartz, former editor of New York Rocker, “They were the great Johnny Appleseed pioneers of punk rock.” Lou Reed, yet another Jewish New York punk rocker, was cajoled by friend and manager Danny Fields into coming to CBGB to see the Ramones play in 1975. Reed loved them, as some footage from the documentary Danny Says makes clear. Per his style, he didn’t mince words:

They’re crazy. That is without a doubt, the most fantastic thing you’ve ever played for me, bar none. It makes everybody else look so bullshit and wimpy—Patti Smith and me included, just wow. Everybody else looks like they’re really old-fashioned. That’s rock ’n’ roll. They really hit where it hurts. They are everything everybody worried about; every parent would freeze in their tracks if they heard this stuff.

John Holmstrom, artist and co-founder of Punk magazine, went to see the band back in one of their shows at CBGB in New York in the mid-’70s, saying later that “The Ramones defined punk rock. … They were the first punk rock band. That first album changed the world.” The Ramones went on to have a huge influence on The Clash, the Sex Pistols, and a host of other bands. Bono of U2 would later say, “We would not be here if it weren’t for the Ramones.” And that’s not to mention the millions of anxious young people struggling to find their footing, as Jeffrey Hyman did back in Forest Hills in the ’50s and ’60s, who’ve found something they need in the Ramones’ music, too.

While the band gained fame and acclaim, Joey Ramone, I’ve come to realize, was far from being just another rock star. His worldview, his philosophy, and his positive and supportive nature set him apart. In the Ramones documentary End of the Century, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore says:

He was to thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people a liberator. He liberated them from their own sense of failure, unpopularity. Joey was a hero because he overcame the odds. He triumphed over geekiness. And he started off as an alien in the world in which he was raised. Joey was never the healthiest person in the world, but he was one of the strongest people I’ve ever known, you know, and he managed to fight off anything and everything all the time.

As you can tell, Joey Ramone refused to conform to social norms and instead found ways to create a life of his own, to live his vocation, and then to share his work in constructive and creative ways that inspired young people like me, people who wanted to push back against the status quo. I love that he did it his way. Longtime rock journalist Legs McNeil wrote:

You know, Joey took everything that was wrong with him and made it beautiful, which I always thought was the greatest thing about Joey, and … the whole philosophy of punk. You take everything that’s shit and you celebrate it and make it good.

McNeil’s counterpart, Bill Bois, writing in TNOCS a couple of months ago, described Joey beautifully:

His depth made him attractive, even fascinating.

His lanky physique and goofy movements made his sudden intensity seem raw, real, and unrehearsed, because it was. His authenticity came across as courageous.

…

He could be tough without being mean, and tender without being weak.

…

Joey didn’t try to be other people’s idea of the ideal singer.

He owned his oddness and made it part of his art. Refusing to hide one’s weaknesses takes confidence, and confidence is deeply attractive.

Having reflected further on his own article, Bois embellished his original piece with additional comments about Joey Ramone, comments that really drove home how special a person Joey seemed to be.

[Joey] wrote what he wanted to write and sang the way he sang without worrying about what people thought. That’s what artists should do.

Say what you need to say. Express yourself the way you want. No one else can do that, only you. Some people will like it, others won’t, but that’s not your concern.

…

That’s what made Joey cool. He didn’t care whether you thought he was cool or not. He just was.

That is, no question, the kind of person I’d want in my huddle. I figure that my figurative Joey Ramone would be super supportive, especially of seemingly oddball ideas like this notion of having a huddle in my head. Unlike the constantly self-critical voice I had in my head as a kid, Joey Ramone’s voice seems joyful and positive. In a piece published in Far Out in London last weekend, Lucy Harbron wrote of the Ramones:

If the band liked you … they’d back you hard and back you loyally,

Like Joey Ramone, I spent many years working to locate my own voice in the (dis)array of critical voices that made it incredibly hard to hear the more positive voices that I knew were also in there, just quieter. So much chatter. So little clarity. Way too much overthinking and self-doubt. You might be able to relate.

Today, it’s a totally different story. Critical voices continue to appear, but there are only two or three of them compared to many dozens of much more positive ones that now show up in my mind so regularly. It’s quite a list, really: Paul Saginaw. Peter Block. Emma Goldman. Seth Godin. Philosopher and later friend Sam Keen. Brenda Ueland, who I wrote about last week. Amazing authors like Julia Cameron and Anne Lamott. Peter Koestenbaum. Rebecca Solnit. Grace Lee Boggs. Gustav Landauer. Maggie Bayless from ZingTrain. Good friends like Molly Stevens and Melvin Parson. John Abrams. I could go for ages and pages, but you get the idea. Some are folks I’ve known in person for many years. Others, like Joey Ramone, I’ve never actually met. Either way, their voices are in the huddle in my head. And with fairly effective facilitation, I’m able to assimilate a wide range of perspectives from people whose views I value a great deal, all of which inform what I do. Decisions are still mine to make, but those decisions are so much sounder thanks to all the good input from a pretty prestigious and values-aligned group of huddle participants.

The cool thing about the huddle in your head—I’m assuming you have one, too, though I know you also may not—is that, unlike real-life huddles or any other meetings we have, we can add anyone we want to it. As long as the participants aren’t perpetually talking over each other and trying to take over the room, the more the merrier, right? So if we come across someone whose wisdom we wish we could tap into regularly, we can slowly but surely and effectively add their voice to our internal huddle.

To do that, we simply need to spend a lot of time with them. That can be in person, as it has been with Paul Saginaw. It can be reading their written work, as it was for me with Emma Goldman. By listening to their talks online. Or a combination of all of those, as it’s been with Peter Block. I’ve read all of his books, I’ve listened to him online, and we talk in person. Essentially, we can get to know new participants in the internal huddle through the sort of regenerative study I wrote about a few weeks ago. When I take a deep dive into the work of someone who inspires me, my energy will almost always increase significantly. Which, as you can tell, is what’s happened to me recently with Joey Ramone.

It turns out that the idea of a huddle in your head isn’t quite as unusual as my critical voices would have had me believe! As Rochel Spangenthal wrote in a 2015 Hevria magazine essay entitled “How To Train The Voices in Your Head,” “It is not just the crazier amongst us; we all hear voices in our heads.” In “Getting to Know the Voices in Your Head,” a 10-year-old Scientific American piece, journalist Ferris Jabr wrote that “We talk to ourselves to stay motivated, tame unruly emotions, plan for the future and even maintain a sense of self.” All of which is, of course, just what happened for me in the ZCoB huddle a few weeks ago.

The original research that introduced the idea of inner voices was done many years ago by another middle-class Jewish guy. In 1977, the Ramones released Rocket to Russia. But half a century earlier, Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, a Russian and Soviet psychologist studying child development, suggested that we’ve all internalized the voices of others, at first primarily our parents but also others of influence. In fact, this single line from Vygotsky sums up this whole essay in five words: “Through others we become ourselves.” A hundred years ago this month, near the end of 1925, Vygotsky completed his graduate dissertation, “The Psychology of Art.” Soviet censors kept it from being published until the 1960s. In it, he wrote that “art is the collectivisation of feeling,” a beautiful description of both the music the Ramones made together and of what we do here in the ZCoB!

Ethan Kross, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, wrote Chatter, a nationally recognized book that goes deep into the impact of inner dialogue. I happened to meet him last month when he was having dinner at the Roadhouse. Kross writes, “The inner voice is a kind of Swiss army knife of a human mind. It is a multipurpose tool that lets you do many things.” I prefer “huddle” to “knife” since I imagine the inner voices as being present in varied abundance. I also imagine myself facilitating their input effectively to get to good conclusions. The idea, though, is similar. As Kross writes, “The mind is flexible, if we know how to bend it.” For me at least, one of the best ways to do that is to add new voices to my inner huddle! Each new voice adds more diversity and depth. Kross, in what could have been an unconscious nod to Vygotsky, says that “We are like Russian nesting dolls of mental conversations.” This week, I’m welcoming Joey Ramone into my Russian history major’s mind.

To be clear, it’s not a bad thing to have some critical voices in our internal huddles. They raise what could be appropriate concerns and bring a touch of cynicism or skepticism. As management consultant Tony Fakhry writes, “It is unwise to get rid of negative thoughts because they can serve a purpose. … All thoughts have their place in the mind, even negative ones. … By turning down the volume on negative chatter, you allow the authentic self to emerge.”

Many albums, thousands of concerts, and plenty of ups and downs later, Joey Ramone died, sadly, in the spring of 2001 from lymphoma. He passed away a few days short of the 25th anniversary of the release of that first Ramones record and a month before what would have been his 50th birthday. As Bill Bois wrote about him:

Emotional closeness—the sense that someone is letting you into their private world — is rare in Pop music, let alone in Punk.

But he had it.

If this internal huddle idea isn’t too terribly strange for you, try giving it a bit of thought. Here are a few questions to mull over:

• Who’s in the huddle in your head right now?
• How can you better facilitate the various participants contributing to your inner conversation, letting the negative voices have their say but keeping them from dominating?
• Who would you like to add to your huddle? Who can help you to add ever more meaning? Who can support you in living a life like Joey Ramone’s—not to be a rock star, but rather to live in a way that makes you say with calm and centered confidence, “This is who I am”?

Let me know what you learn!

Wisdom, emotional intelligence, a deep determination to be himself, exceptional creative expression, joy, and generosity … the things Joey Ramone brought the world make him the kind of human I’d like to have to the huddle in my head. As Joey said, “For me, punk is about real feelings. It’s not about, ‘Yeah, I am a punk and I’m angry.’ That’s a lot of crap. It’s about loving the things that really matter: passion, heart, and soul.”

Huddle even better

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Learning anew and renewing an end-of-year tradition

Two years ago, I decided to try starting a tradition. Or, if you prefer, a ritual.

The first time you do something, there’s absolutely nothing traditional about it. The idea has yet to sink roots into the cultural context in which it’s being planted. If it takes, then, by the second or third or fourth year, it might have gained a bit of momentum.

The tradition I’m talking about is a late-December invitation to reread some of the other 51 essays that have come out in this enews earlier in the year. And also to celebrate the import of rereading. Rereading, I’ve come to believe, is significantly more important in our current era of social media scrolling, when far too many people seem to spend about 20 seconds on something before moving on. The idea is to go back and pull out some of the essays I’ve written over the last year, the ones that feel most worthy of rereading, and then share them here for folks to dig into in the downtime many find themselves with during the week of the holidays.

Rereading, I’ll suggest, comes up a lot less often than it ought to. I wonder, now and then, why we tend to listen to our favorite records over and over again, often one time immediately after another, without thinking twice about why we do it. Almost everyone (me included) listens to music they like multiple times. The written word, by contrast, is seen as a one-and-done experience more often than not. One reads, one learns, one leaves it behind.

My hope here is to encourage all of us (me included) to take up rereading as a much more regular activity. Our lives, our learning, our companies, and the country, I believe, would be better off for it! The poet Sonia Sanchez once advised, “In order to survive, you should reread Toni Morrison every 10 years.” I’ll take her wise words one step further. I’m going to track down one of Toni Morrison’s many great books from my shelves and return to what I have already read and learned from once before.

The benefit of doing this is not, of course, limited to books by Toni Morrison. In order to thrive, we would be wise to reread the work of writers we learn from far more frequently than most of us are inclined to do. New insights, creative connections, inspiring ideas, and then some are almost certain to emerge.

The poet Joseph Brodsky, who taught at the University of Michigan here in Ann Arbor for many years after escaping from the autocratic oppression of the Soviet Union, wrote that “Man is what he reads.” Those of us who have committed ourselves to living reflective lives would be wise to remember to do regular rounds of rereading! In which context, I’d now consider paraphrasing Brodsky: Reflective man is what he rereads! (I let Brodsky’s use of “man” stand, but of course the point is relevant to all human beings who like to learn.) The books and essays that have influenced me most are the ones I have reread. I find new insights and much more.

I have said many times, and will almost certainly say many times again, that the writer Brenda Ueland changed my life. When I first read her 1938 book, If You Want to Write, about 30 years ago, it blew my mind and altered almost every belief I had about writing. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read its 175-or-so pages, but it’s probably somewhere close to 10. The other day, I picked up Ueland’s book once again because … why not? Brenda Ueland has never let me down. I learn something new every time I go through If You Want to Write. My copy is heavily underlined and bookmarked, to the point of being unworkable, but still, when I reread, I learn anew what I know that I once knew. Often, it’s something I liked early on but had forgotten about. Other times, it’s something I’d missed in my many reads.

The other day I did it again and was rewarded. When I began to reread If You Want to Write, I was reminded of the inspiring message that’s square in the middle of the first page. It’s a line that fits wonderfully well with my anarchist studies and that, to this day, informs a lot of my own belief system:

Everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.

That belief underlies everything we do in our organization, so I was grateful to read it again. It’s what I found so inspiring about last week’s huddle for the entire Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB). It underlies my beliefs about democracy, why it is both possible and practical and why I decided to get to work on a pamphlet that I hope to have out for sale soon. Autocratic leaders, in companies or countries, generally believe the inverse: In the absence of humility, they work with the belief that they themselves are incredibly talented, that they are original in ways no one else can match, and that they have a wealth of wonderfully important things to say that a whole company, or whole country, needs to hear. By contrast, the way we work here in the ZCoB, is based, essentially, on what Ueland wrote back in 1938.

I have tried to train myself to pay attention to each person I meet—young or old—in the belief that what they are about to tell me might inform what we do in new ways or offer insights that spark further thoughts that help me process the world in new ways. That is, in fact, exactly what happened with the piece I wrote about regenerative studying a few weeks ago. Talking to Fionna Gault about salt and pepper shakers led to a whole new way to look at what I’ve actually been doing my whole life.

What is true of regenerative studying is equally true with rereading. I have noticed several parallels:

• I am reminded of insights I had long since forgotten about.
• Because I underline when I read, I can see what was interesting to me back at the time I first read the material.
• I learn new things every time I do it. I can’t imagine I’ve ever gotten every possible learning out of any book, and rereading helps me notice descriptions, observations, connections, and more that I completely missed the first time through. Writer Clifton Fadiman—who famously once wrote that cheese is “milk’s leap into immortality”—was a big believer in rereading for this reason. As he puts it:When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

It’s certainly true for me. Rereading Brenda Ueland recently, I stumbled on a second line that I had totally spaced on, one that remains remarkably good advice nonetheless, advice I try to live every day and every week in this enews: “Write only what you think.” Ueland’s directive reinforces my long-standing resistance to write about anything I don’t believe. It’s also, I can see now, an invitation to revisit the piece I did last spring on the idea of meaningful and regenerative marketing, marketing that, unlike so much mass marketing in the modern era, is based on telling the truth.

What I think here is that taking time to reread is a really good idea! I’m aligned with Ciflton Fadiman’s daughter, the writer Anne Fadiman, who echoed her father’s feelings on the subject:

The reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.

The reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.

The Fadimans are hardly the only folks who feel this way. The other afternoon I was chatting casually with ZingTrain Co-Managing Partner Joanie Hales. She told me that the ZingTrain team is starting its own version of the Leaders Are Readers program that the Roadhouse managers started five or six years ago and are still doing regularly. Last week all the Roadhouse managers read and then discussed “Secret #42: “It’s All About Alignment.” During the course of the conversation, Joanie shared thoughts on the idea with ZingTrain’s Kerstin Woodside, who will be co-leading the ZingTrain reading program. Joanie said this:

When I need to retain information, I find it helpful to revisit a section multiple times. Similarly, when I’m seeking an extra boost of inspiration, returning to something I’ve found meaningful in the past often helps. I think of rereading like watching a movie for a second time: I already know the major plot points, but I notice the smaller details with greater depth and appreciation.

I’jaaz Tello, who works in the Bakehouse, offered another wonderful take on rereading, sort of a voyeuristic version (in a good way). It’s certainly something that had never crossed my mind, but now that I’jaaz shared it, I’m intrigued. “I like to buy used books,” he told me, “and I’m always hoping that I’ll get one that was underlined by whoever owned it before me. I love seeing what they marked.”

Part of what I value so much about doing this writing every week is the interaction that it initiates with so many of you. After last year’s piece on rereading, Kate Mueller, a longtime ZingTrain client who lives in Maine and writes Live with Sass, shared some great insights on her own learnings from rerereading:

For a whole variety of reasons, [last] December I decided to resume rereading. I’m reading the books in roughly the order I very first experienced them in, over a decade ago.

They are all heavily underlined, annotated, and dog-eared.

It is a lot like catching up with an old friend, to see the familiar passages and to remember a bit about who I was when these resonated.

But it’s also been fascinating to discover that there are new passages that resonate now, some that I hadn’t previously underlined or annotated.

It’s a bit of a relief, to be honest, to discover that the reading is giving me things again. Or to feel that I’m open enough to hear them.

Sometimes it feels to me as if this is the one true measure I have of seeing how much I’ve grown or changed as a person, to discover the books that do (or don’t) still resonate with me, and which parts of them do. As if it’s an acknowledgement of where I was stuck or the problems I was facing before, and how I’ve moved past those into new problems or sticking points.

With all of Kate’s wise words in mind, in rereading, I was reminded that on the final page of If You Want to Write, Brenda Ueland makes this point:

The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence … but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e., share it with others?

Which, I realize now, sort of sums up what I try to do every week with writing. To know some new truth and beauty, to understand better so that I can do better, to share my own learnings so that they can illuminate your life and work as well. I never take for granted how great it is to be part of such a positive, interesting, and insightful community. To be able to learn from people like Brenda Ueland, Joanie Hales, and Kate Mueller, to be able to really write, as Brenda Ueland and I believe best, only what I really think. To make, serve, and sell only products that I—or, in many cases, we—really believe in. To be part of a community, both inside the ZCoB and in Washtenaw County, that is so caring, so thoughtful, so supportive, and so patient.

The first piece on the rereading list below is “Living Customer Service as a Love Story.” In the spirit of which, much love and appreciation to you all for making all that we do at Zingerman’s possible. A thousand thanks for all your caring support! It means the world!

Reread! Rejoice! Return over and over again to what you believe. Remember, as Brenda Ueland emphasized:

Everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.

10 Top 5s to Reread

1. “Living Customer Service as a Love Story: Seventh Stories, Patti Smith, and a 1932 Sōetsu Yanagi essay on patterns“
    
2. “Using Frameworks to Foster Free Thinking: Helping everyone we hire learn how to think for themselves”
    
3. “An Appreciation for Apricity and the Story of the Serbian Students: Finding hope and inspired resistance in wholly unexpected places”
    
4. “Lessons from the Dust Bowl—How Humility Can Change the World: Learning from “wrong side up” and the wisdom of Woody Guthrie”
    
5. “Trying to Do Right by Democracy in Difficult Times: Maybe apricots are the answer”
    
6. “Helping Others Become Themselves: Learning to ‘fill oneself with oneself’ could change the world”
    
7. “Owning Our Lives Opens the Door to Making a Meaningful Difference: The inspiration of two ‘extra-ordinary’ women”
    
8. “Small Actions Matter in Much Bigger Ways Than We Might Imagine: Pint-sized ideas, the struggle of self-doubt, and learning to take action anyway”
    
9. “The Beauty and Benefit of Regenerative Studying: Digging into any subject yields fascinating results”
    
10. “The Power of Joy to Transform Our Organizations: Cut-up poetry and prioritizing joyfulness even in the face of pain”
     

Actually, here’s one more that I almost forgot to include:
“Learning to Lead While Feeling Lost: Life Lessons from The Tao of Archibald Tiny”
 

“Learning to Lead While Feeling Lost” shares life lessons from the blind and deaf senior Shih Tzu that Tammie rescued in August of 2024. At the time, he was very thin and barely able to walk. She named him Archie. Tammie told me later that he was in such bad shape that she didn’t think he’d live two weeks. Sixteen months later, Archie is an inspiration. He’s healthy: He has gained weight, eats home-cooked meals, and happily walks all over the house.

I realized this week that Archie is happily “rereading” the smells of the house to go to where he knows the water bowls are, or to his bed, or to the spot in the living room where he likes to lie in the sun. Archie inspires me anew every night. Even though he can neither see nor hear, within minutes of me coming home, he’s caught my scent and begins barking for me to pick him up and hold him. In fact, he’s sitting on my lap right now while I write. When I’ve felt down, anxious, or unsure of how to go forward in recent months, I reread this essay. If Archie can do it, I can do it, too!

Be well! Happy everything!

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P.S. If you want to reread even more, check out last year’s piece on rereading, and keep scrolling for earlier write-ups about really terrific items we carry at the Deli, Bakeshop, Roadhouse, and Mail Order!

P.P.S. For those who might be looking for a great gift, or just a way to keep warm, the Apricots for Democracy and Dignity t-shirt site I set up with Rishi Narayan of Underground Printing here in Ann Arbor, now has Carhartt jackets we can order with apricots embroidered on the breast pocket! Scroll down a small bit to find the Carhartt stuff. I just ordered two! Plus, there are now apricot beanies and baseball caps to boot! Join us, if you’d like, in sending a quiet, inclusive, and inspiring positive message to the world. All proceeds are donated to Democracy Now!

A dozen democratically oriented gifts from a monthly huddle

The insightful author Allegra Hyde wrote in Lit Hub back in the winter of 2022:

A great first line can spur intense readerly attraction—provoke a compulsion to know more. Let’s call this: love at first sentence.

Opening lines, reflections on writing, references to Romanian fairy tales, a British anarchist folksinger, a famous free-thinking French author, an acclaimed American historian, a contemporary Russian dissident, the value of open book finance, come together below to deliver a whole bunch of great conceptual holiday gifts for anyone who’s interested in enhancing the health of their organization.

All that and then some is here, in the essay that follows. It could, I know, sound strange, but if you’re willing, curious, or both, stick with me for a bit.

Let me start at the beginning.

Anyone who writes regularly—or for that matter, reads often—knows that the opening lines Allegra Hyde has alluded to have an outsized impact on an essay. Most writing, by hierarchical definition, has one opening line. This piece, perhaps more inclusively, has a baker’s dozen of them, spread out and marked throughout the essay. I have moved the pieces and paragraphs around aplenty and landed on the way it is, but, really, all would work well as traditional first lines. Rather than get caught in the usual rules of writing, then, I just decided that in the spirit of anarchism, equity, and the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB) huddle I’m writing about, to include all of the voices in the “room” without getting too hung up on hierarchy. If we can have close to a hundred people come together for the gathering at which we run the organization and do it with grace, goodwill, mutual aid, dignity, and positive coexistence, I don’t see why multiple first lines can’t do the same.

With that said, here’s the second of the opening lines. It’s a great one to put on your wall or your screensaver. It comes from my friend, the Irish writer Gareth Higgins:

When you encounter a story, ask yourself, “Is this story true, and is it helpful?”

The answer to both questions here is a very enthusiastic “yes!” What follows is indeed all true. I hope, too, that it’s also hugely helpful. For me, it’s so true and so helpful, in fact, that I shifted away from topics I’d previously intended to write about this week to bring you what we might consider as the happy and healthy equivalent of headline news here in the ZCoB.

To be clear, there’s no drama in the details that follow. What you will find is the result of a whole lot of good work, done by many hundreds of people over a period of probably 30 years or more! Out of which, over the course of three hours of our monthly huddle last week, a long list of great, very practical gifts of organizational design is embedded.

The huddle commenced at 9 am last Thursday in the larger of the two training rooms at ZingTrain. Facilitator for the morning, Elph Morgan, called us all to order. Before the meeting really commenced, though, everyone present quickly introduced themselves to get each person’s voice in the room. In the spirit of which, here’s a third, and very lovely, opening line. It’s a quote from one of my favorite books of all time, Why the Bee Is Busy, and Other Romanian Fairy Tales, published in 1939 and penned by Idella Purnell and John Weatherwax. When I first read the line a decade or so ago, I went back and reread it about 10 times in a row to really get its full implications. It still makes me smile all these years later. And I’m reminded of it every time something sort of magical happens, something that seems like it will be beyond belief for more cynical leaders. Something like last week’s huddle. At the start of the book, the authors share this atypical take on the way so many fairy tales begin:

Once upon a time what happened did happen, and if it had not happened, you would not be hearing this story.

The story I’m about to tell is, as I’ve already alluded, about the 80-plus people who convened for that monthly huddle last Thursday. In a moment when headlines are dominated by bluster, brutality, conflict, indignity, exclusion, a drive to divide, and, increasingly, verbal and physical violence, this was very much the opposite. It was both impressive and inspiring. It was also a wonderfully peaceful, nonviolent act of inclusive coming together to work on any number of issues at hand. The compassion, interest, empathy, kindness, and dignity I witnessed there left me in awe. (Something similarly special, I remember, happened about 18 months ago—you can read about it here.) The group’s wisdom, powers of self-reflection, and ability to work together all felt like a gift. It sort of seemed like some kind of organizational Santa arrived at work a couple of weeks early and left an array of gifts under our metaphorical tree. Not gifts for me, but gifts to be shared here so that you can, if you so choose, adapt them to your workplace in creative ways. They are things that, I realize, have come together to make what we do here in the ZCoB work the way it does. While that morning felt magical, the gifts themselves are quite practical. They can be implemented nearly anytime and by anyone who’s committed to doing the work to make them happen.

Speaking of unexpected gifts, I was already pondering the concept of momentum after what I wrote last week and reflecting on the power of writing first lines, when I came upon a 2001 conversation between writer George Plimpton and poet Billy Collins in The Paris Review. Plimpton, conducting the interview at the time that Collins served as the Poet Laureate of the United States, asked him to explain the genesis of his poems. As soon as I read the piece, I knew that Collins’ response, which is about opening lines, could have been another darned good starting point for this essay. (If you’re keeping score, that’s #4). Collins explains:

Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times—and this, I think, is a sense you develop—I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum—the poem finds a reason for continuing. The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. … the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with. You’re trying to discover something that you don’t know exists, maybe something of value.

In this case, what I discovered last Thursday morning are, in a sense, things that I already knew well—after all, we’ve been huddling here for something like 30 years! Billy Collins, though, got me thinking about what we do in a whole new way. And although I had other topics penciled onto my writing docket, I left the ZCoB huddle so energized that I couldn’t help but reflect, connect, and then write about what I learned in an effort to share the truth of the story and be helpful about what I shared.

I could have easily, I know, completely missed all these lessons. After all, this was the 15th ZCoB huddle we’ve held this year, and I’ve probably been to about 300 of these huddles over the years. It would have been easy to just go through the motions. I’m glad I was more mindful. In the context of which, here’s another good opening line. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk and peace activist, offers this:

Mindfulness is the energy that helps us recognize the conditions of happiness that are already present in our lives.

Early Sunday morning, in what would also have been yet another way to open this essay, marketing guru and author Seth Godin posted a short piece about the problems that come from taking things for granted:

We don’t notice that the tree we planted a few years ago thrives just a bit more each day. We don’t notice that the mail shows up when it’s supposed to, that our civilization persists in the face of chaos, and that the lights (usually) go on when we flip a switch.

…

What would happen if we paid as much attention to these persistent delights as we pay to the annoying surprises that unfold each day?
The narrative of our time here becomes our lived experience.

All of which fits well with my focus this week. It’s a narrative of my lived experience of last week’s ZCoB huddle. The main point for me, woven into all of these inspiring opening lines, is that the huddle is, in its ever-imperfect form, a very real example of the kind of real-life, down-to-earth, and democratically oriented organizational practice that so many people in this country are seeking.

While we can’t wave a magic wand and change what’s happening in Washington, we can absolutely alter our organizational design to weave more democratic practices into our daily reality. In the course of three hours, the huddle offered a host of ways any workplace—from Congress to a corner store to a local cafe—could be a more positive, engaging, and effective place to be a part of.

For anyone, me included, who feels the tension of seeing the country shift away from democratic practice in the U.S., I would suggest turning to the insight of Nadya Tolokonnikova. Tolokonnikova spent the first 25 years of her life living under Russia’s repressive autocratic regime and is one of the women who came together in Moscow to found the performance art group Pussy Riot in 2011. At the time, Tolokonnikova was 22 years old. The following year, she was arrested and spent nearly two years in various Russian prisons and labor camps before being released into freedom in the West. Given her lifetime of experience fighting with autocracy, Tolokonnikova recently offered Americans both a warning and an opportunity, a bit of chronological context, and for me, another possible opening line:

You are in a beautiful moment when under pressure, you can produce beautiful art. … [B]ut you have to understand that there will be a moment when you won’t be able to do all this stuff.

If we are indeed in that first moment, the beautiful one, then down-to-earth democratic practices are a lot of what we need to make a positive difference. The ZCoB huddle was just that. It is, in the best possible way, a collaborative act of beautiful organizational art. Rather than being mostly about the wishes of one autocratic leader, as so many companies would make it, this was all about the group. What we did, we truly did together.

Which reminds me about a recent interview historian Timothy Snyder did with journalist Jessica Yellin on News Not Noise. In it, Snyder offered me yet another first line when he said:

You can’t change [the world] by yourself. You can only do it in an organization.

Which is, sure enough, what the huddle reminds me. Whatever I might make happen on my own, it pales in comparison to the power of the group—in this case, close to a hundred of us who huddled together—that made it possible. Any of us, of course, can make a difference on our own. But what we can accomplish together goes far beyond any ability to achieve individually. What happened here last Thursday is a model for what might happen anywhere! It’s not the sort of work that most Americans experience, but, as per what Why the Bee Is Busy tells us, what happened really did happen, and if it had not happened, you surely would not be hearing this story.

Last week’s ZCoB huddle reminded me of the goodness that is possible in the world, even if most of the world is looking the other way. Here are a dozen great gifts that I took away from that three-hour gathering. Pick, choose, adapt, and use as you see fit. All, I believe, can be of great organizational value! Each can serve as a good opening line for organizational change and the work to enhance the quality of your culture. One item on this list will likely have to go first for you, but it won’t make the other openings into organizational improvement any less valuable:

1. It happened! Consistently conducted meetings and organizational rituals have far more power than most people realize. Ideas are easy. It’s the implementation, effective and practiced over extended periods of time, that really makes things happen. Regularly repeated practices like the huddle offer very little drama, but they are a big part of making positive organizations what they are. British folksinger Billy Bragg, after attending a pro-democracy rally in London not long ago, drove home this point: “You don’t just do it one afternoon and then you’ve done your bit. You have to carry on and keep on pushing.” Just keeping the ZCoB Huddle going as long as we have (for about 30 years in various forms) is no small feat. The fact that it has gotten better over the years is even cooler. Our huddles (in rudimentary form) started with eight people meeting, and we didn’t even call them “huddles” yet. But, as you can tell, they evolved. In yet another possible opening to this essay, the amazing author Suleika Jaoud wrote this on the subject of conscious repetition in a recent Substack:I’m endlessly fascinated by what accrues when we commit to something tiny, daily, and ours. A practice doesn’t need grandeur to be transformative. It just needs to be repeated.I am confident that the same power can be manifested in any event that’s made to happen regularly. The huddle is really a ritual, the one regularly occurring event where the ZCoB gathers! It is not particularly grand, but I was reminded this past Thursday that it indeed is powerfully transformative.
2. Great facilitation. As I wrote in my piece on meetings a few months ago, having a skilled facilitator at a meeting (especially a big one like the ZCoB huddle) is hugely helpful. Making it someone who is not the boss is valuable. It made an enormous difference in our organization when we started to separate meeting leadership from meeting facilitation many years ago. At the ZCoB huddle last week, Elph Morgan, our multi-talented, longtime IT director, ably facilitated the meeting. There’s actually a whole team of five or six folks that facilitate at various points. All have other, much bigger roles in the organization, but still, they make time to meet regularly to review the huddle, share learnings, talk about things they want to do better, and more. Granted, we’re a bigger organization, but just having someone who’s not the boss facilitate is a big deal on its own. It moves power around the room in a wonderful and important way.
3. Open meetings. Something like 25 years ago, we switched our default mode for who we include in meetings. Rather than follow the usual routine of keeping meetings closed, with only those who needed to be there in attendance, we began to default to meetings being open unless there was a compelling reason to keep them private. As a result, the ZCoB huddle, which was originally limited to partners many years ago, has long been open to everyone who works in our organization. It could be their second day, or they may have been working at Mail Order for just two months, but they’re still welcome. We pay them to come (and there’s food!), and they are encouraged to actively participate!
4. A diverse group of participants makes for a more positive meeting. Despite current headlines out of Washington, the reality remains that in nature, the healthiest ecosystems are the most diverse. It is, of course, equally true in organizations. The huddle demonstrated, once again, the beauty of all that. This was a really diverse group! Many at this gathering have been with us well over 20 years, but there was also someone there who just started three or four weeks ago. There were a fair few partners—it’s where we make organization-wide decisions, so they’re supposed to be there—but we also had folks who work the production line at Mail Order, a busboy, a baker, and a newsletter maker. As Gareth Higgins says, “Each human being, each of us — that’s you and me, is a universe of indescribable value. No one is worth more or less than any other.” And that is indeed what we aspire to show at the huddle. Like all the first lines in this essay, everyone in attendance could learn to take the lead, and, I’m confident, do it well!
5. Bringing everyone’s voice into the room. Years ago, Stas’ Kazmierski taught us to get everyone’s voice heard at the beginning of a meeting. It helps people feel included and increases the odds that they’ll participate. With 90 or 100 people, as we had last week, the icebreaker needs to be simple and quick, but we always do it. Everyone says their name and which business they’re from, then answers a question the facilitator has chosen. I believe last week’s was “What’s your favorite holiday food?” My answer was Pfeffernusse.
6. A new manager’s intro. We have a long-standing ritual that new managers in the ZCoB come to the huddle and do a formal introduction to the organization. It’s a wonderful way to connect dots across the organization, opening the door for the new manager to meet dozens of others from different parts of the organization. Basically, it’s an interview (like the one George Plimpton did with Billy Collins, only in this case it’s about the poetry of working in the ZCoB, rather than what it’s like to write a poem). Call it a casual but very cool Q&A done by one of the partners. The manager last week, Mara Neering, is the new accountant at the Roadhouse. Mara actually worked in ZCoB ages ago, when she was a student at Community High School next door to the Deli. She later moved to other cities, studied accounting, worked for an array of other restaurant groups, and then returned to the ZCoB via the Roadhouse last spring. Her responses, and her reflections on how different (in a good way) working here is, literally brought me to tears (also in a good way).
7. Open-book management. The first half of the three-hour huddle is really a ZCoB-wide practice of open-book management. Each business reviews its numbers, talks a bit about what’s happened, and, if we do our work well, offers even more about what’s coming up. People ask questions or make suggestions, sometimes both. I learn a ton every time. Open book is a game-changer!
8. Collaboration. By bringing such a diverse group together to talk about in-the-moment business issues and share forecasts for the coming months, the odds of collaboration are significantly increased. As writer Rebecca Gray Howell notes, “‘Collaboration is relational,’ … it is the relationship of the collaborators that makes the end-result.” And that is, indeed, just what happens in the huddle.
9. Slow and steady! When it comes to huddles, slow and steady doesn’t lead to headlines, but it will win the race. In an interview in the new issue of The Paris Review, French writer Hélène Cixous, born into a Jewish family in Algeria in the spring of 1937, suggests that most people are not interested in small things with “infinite wealth and complexity.” Rather, Cixioux says, “What they want is to receive a message at top speed, in big letters.” There is really no speed or big letters in either this essay or the ZCoB huddle. The way we do our huddles definitely takes time. Doing it well absolutely requires attention. And the wealth and complexity are infinite indeed.
10. Consensus decision-making. I’ve written a great deal about this subject. I continue to believe that using consensus in the right places could help many more organizations. It is, without question, a good way to make an organization more effectively democratic. We have been using consensus at the Partner level here for over 30 years now. While all hundred or so folks in the room can participate, the final decisions are made by consensus of the 22-person Partners Group. It works!
11. Staff Partners and transition. This is a bit of a two-fer on the list. You can read much more about Staff Partners here and see how powerful our decision to have them (made by consensus of the Partners Group) has been. At this huddle, we marked a transition, thanking two Staff Partners whose two-year terms were ending and welcoming two new ones into the role. It gave us a chance to formally recognize Jenny Tubbs of Zingerman’s Press and Hazim Tugun from the Bakehouse, who were great additions to the Partners Group for the last two years. Their closing comments were insightful and heartwarming. We then welcomed Rob Davis of Mail Order and Jason Ujvari from our Creative Services team. They shared inspiring intros, and I look forward to working with them.
12. Ending with appreciations. For 30 years now, we end our huddles—and every meeting, for that matter—with what my friend Lex Alexander taught us to call “appreciations.” It’s a few minutes—or in the case of a big meeting like the huddle, about 15 minutes—for people to publicly appreciate anyone or anything they want. Not everyone does, but many do. It always ends the meeting on a magically upbeat note of gratitude and good energy!

The construct of the huddle could, I believe, be an answer to a question my friend Carne Ross asked in his Substack last weekend. Ross was a dedicated British Foreign Service diplomat who grew greatly disillusioned by his government’s deceptive behavior and dissemination of disinformation surrounding the invasion of Iraq. Unable to deal with the dishonesty and obvious lack of institutional integrity, Carne Ross had the courage to resign. It seems that in the years following, Carne came upon anarchism, really in much the same way I stumbled onto the subject of dignity when dealing with my despair after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Carne began to write, too. A regular flow of books and essays has ensued. Eight years ago last April, Carne and I first connected about our shared affinity for anarchism. Ideas, support, and insight have flowed fairly regularly ever since. In a question that could well have offered me another outstanding opening to this piece, Carne inquires:

Could it be a system which through its collective but mindful (very mindful) construction promotes the maximisation of human freedom, fosters relations with others that bring to abundant life what matters most, love, and fuels and celebrates the exploration and, one hopes, the fulfilment of our very selves, at last. Imagine that! Can we?

My quick answer to Carne’s question is “Yes!”

To be clear, I don’t hold up the huddle here as some panacea to be universally embraced, but rather as a reminder that everyone can create something for themselves. They can design governance that’s appropriate for their own ecosystem, rather than have some faraway group of executives consult with outside experts hired to do the design for them. We have long said that the huddle is where we run the business. At least for a couple of hours, it’s a pretty remarkable and very different framework for running an organization of any sort!

In a quiet but very powerful way, the huddle strikes me as an example of what my friends at Indigenous Resistance say, in yet another worthy opening line:

Those who have dub power, lift us all up.

The huddle did indeed have dub power, and it did indeed lift a lot of us up in a big and very wonderful way! It also led me back to a story the members of Indigenous Resistance have shared. It’s about a spiritual leader they met many years ago in a Vietnamese monastery, who shared this:

I believe we need new ways of looking at power.

Compared to a typical board of directors meeting for another $80 million company, the ZCoB huddle is absolutely a new way of looking at power.

So, what does all of this mean in the context of the greater ecosystem we all belong to? In my attempt to parse all of this and understand the positive implications of the work at hand, I’ve found myself deep in the music of a British musician named David Benjamin Blower. A poet, a singer-songwriter, an author, a philosopher, a cellist, a guitar player, and more, Blower is, I believe, a very special person.

I have five of Blower’s albums, but of late I keep returning to his 2019 release, the title of which seems ideally suited to this week’s subject: We Really Existed and We Really Did This. My mind has been especially engaged with the second song, whose title would’ve been a wonderful first line for this essay, as you can tell, did become its title: “Everything is Changed.” The lyrics are strangely timely and perhaps a bit prescient. This song could serve as a soundtrack for any of us trying to make sense of the moment. At the very least, it feels like the right reflection on what will emerge from this country’s current existential crisis. Its opening line might well be the most powerful of all that I’ve offered in this essay. Here are the lyrics:

Everything is changed
All didst run its course
The present fears nothing more
Than a Trojan Horse
Ye who stake your existence
On borders and walls
The emerging future’s among you!
It’s within us all!
Everything is changed
Be still and listen
….
Everything is strange
Who here moved the piece?
That began the rearrangement
Of all things from west to east
Behold the readjustment
Of all those who said they knew
And all of the listless players
That don’t know what to do

Everything does feel like it’s changing, and it certainly seems pretty strange. If we can shape that change into something positive, then organizations working in ways akin to the huddle could be the future! Looking back at her childhood, Hélène Cixous remarks how her family members “were free … I realized only later how exceptional this was … Everything was alive.” This is very much what that huddle represents to me. The energy was awesome. It caught me up, and I followed its lead by writing this piece. This situation also reminds me of what Hélène Cixous said in a piece of hers published in The Paris Review:

I could say that I write the text, but it’s much more the case that the text writes me. It asks, Are you coming? And I reply, Yes, I am following you.

In that sense, I suppose the huddle sort of “wrote me.” It asked if I was going to come along to learn new lessons. And, as you can see, I followed. I hope some of the practices I shared above might serve as openings for you to make positive, more democratic, and more effective ways to work in your own organization.

In an era like ours, in which American authoritarianism is clearly on the rise, I frequently return to theologian Richard Rohr’s suggestion that “the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” Note that Rohr does not say “the practice of the perfect.” The work of democracy, whether it’s in a monthly huddle or any other format, is to get going with dignity and deference, to come together imperfectly, and to have conversations that create connection, collaboration, insight, and inspiration and make meaningful things happen in the process. It can be done.

So with all that in mind, we face the future, a future in which it feels like everything has changed. In response to which, yes, we can go out on the streets to demonstrate for dignity and democracy and, at the same time, we can also demonstrate that democratic practices are possible in down-to-earth, real-life ways.

In the interview with Jessica Yellin I mentioned earlier, Timothy Snyder said:

You can’t just watch democracy. Democracy isn’t a thing. It’s a verb. Like are you doing democracy? If we all do a little bit of democracy, I really do think all this is going to turn out.

When I take a step back, I realize the ZCoB huddle is just what Snyder describes: democracy in action. And when I reflect on the power of those three hours and the countless hours of work that have gone into making them possible, I come back to the title of David Benjamin Blower’s album, which is yet another good opening line. One day, we will be able to look back on this challenging period of our history, and with the benefit of much more distance than we might have today, we will say:

We really existed. And we really did this!

Much love and appreciation to you all. Let’s get to work!

Do something great with dignity

P.S. Gareth Higgins and I will be co-teaching a two-day ZingTrain seminar on March 25 and 26, entitled Reframing Your Leadership Stories and Beliefs. Seats are limited to sign up soon—we only do this once a year!

Lessons from the Paris Commune of 1871

Scholar Henry Giroux, who turned 82 two months ago last week, wrote recently that “Americans have forgotten what democracy is about.” What follows is an exploration of one way we might help ourselves, and the people we work with, to remember. To be clear, it’s not about what happens in Washington. This is about our workplaces. It’s about what we can all do to help everyone in our organizations better engage in the kind of free thinking that any effective democratic construct calls for, whether it’s in a small company or a large country.

To put it another way, this essay is essentially about class. Not in a class-war kind of way, though. This is about the work the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB) does to offer an array of insightful classes. Classes about everything from food philosophy to finance, customer service to courageous conversations. The key here is that the many dozens of classes we offer are available to everyone in our organization. As one coworker once told me,

I have never before talked to the owner of a company I was employed at about my personal life goals. The owners of Zingerman’s not only reinforce them, they pay me to take classes to make them happen. Literally, they pay me to better my personal life. That’s totally crazy.

After decades of doing this, it’s very clear to me that all this class work we do alters our business for the better and improves the lives of the people who work here. I am also confident in saying that it strengthens our community and our country. Lately, though, I’ve noticed that their significance—and the fact that we open them to everyone in the organization, regardless of job title, age, or seniority, and pay them to attend—is far greater than what I’d assumed before.

In a piece published two years ago in The Paris Review, the remarkable writer Hanif Abdurraqib—who I admire greatly for passing on the publicity that might come with moving to the East or West Coast, as many artists do, and instead staying rooted in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio—commented on the state of the country. In his words, our society “is obsessed with punishment, particularly for the most marginalized.” As I reflect on what dominates the news and current national trends, what Abdurraqib wrote resonates. It is a difficult reality to get my mind around. As Sarah Harris from the band Dolly Creamer sings in her song “Live in There,” “We’re in a movie that does not move me.”

There are many places, of course, that we can collectively help those who have less. As psychologist Abraham Maslow pointed out in his oft-referenced Hierarchy of Needs, food, shelter, and safety are always the most critical concerns for anyone living on the edge of physical survival. Beyond that, though, Abdurraqib’s insightful comment made me curious:

• What would it look like if, instead of prioritizing punishment and retribution, our society was instead obsessing over education and learning?
• What if businesses across the country were willing to teach finance and philosophy and Servant Leadership and the like to everyone in an organization, from entry-level staff to upper-level managers, helping them think like leaders and engage with complex issues in creative and challenging (in a positive sense) ways?
• What if many of those classes were not just about teaching specific job skills but rather about helping people learn to think? What if they helped people at all levels of the organization grow into themselves and become actively engaged with the sorts of philosophical issues that are usually left to upper-level leaders to grapple with in more formal settings? These kinds of learning opportunities are rarely offered to folks on the front lines. What if making them readily available to all became the national norm?

I realize that we’ve been trying to answer these questions in our day-to-day lives at Zingerman’s for many, many years now. It’s impossible to isolate the impact of all those classes from everything else we do, but I have no hesitation in saying that it’s hugely significant. Without our constant focus on learning and teaching, we would be a very different organization. The classes we teach are, in a sense, another entrée into the benefits of the regenerative studying I wrote about a few weeks ago. They support the growth and development of many dozens of us—probably more, actually—who work here every year!

Our decision to offer so much training came out of our deeply-held belief that people want to learn, that when people are thinking more clearly and cohesively, they feel better and do better; and that everyone in the organizational ecosystem—customers, neighbors, vendors, and community—benefits in the process. We did it because, to us, it just seemed to be the right thing to do. It was intuitive. That said, there’s recent data to back up our long-standing belief. This past spring, the Harvard Business School wrote that “Research shows that companies experience a 17 percent increase in productivity and a 21 percent boost in profitability when employees receive targeted training. … Teams feel valued, empowered, and motivated. This sense of purpose fuels a culture where growth, collaboration, and innovation flourish.”

The idea of constant learning is deeply embedded in the essence of our organization. We like to learn. We want to understand why things are the way they are now and also how they got that way. History major that I am, I’m happy to say that nearly every class we teach includes some history. I will share a whole bunch of that next Tuesday night when I teach my annual Best of 2025 tasting class at the Deli.

Speaking of history, Henry Giroux started his career in education as a high school history teacher. He warns that “The dominant culture actively functions to suppress the development of a critical historical consciousness among the populace.” History, he reminds anyone who’ll listen, has important lessons to teach us:

We need to realize that if you can’t learn from history, you go beyond the cliché of simply repeating it; you find yourself in a place of danger in which historical consciousness and its relevance turns to historical amnesia. … The United States suffers greatly from historical amnesia.

With Giroux’s warning in mind, I’ve had a realization of late. It happened while studying the history of the remarkable 19th-century French activist, anarchist, and educator Louise Michel. More than ever, thanks to her impassioned writing and speaking on the subject, I can see the import and impact of our efforts to make classes and other forms of learning widely available to everyone in the organization. In her memoirs, published in 1886, Michel wrote that the powers that be in society “do not want to share the sweetest thing of this old world: knowledge and learning.” For Michel, education was as important as eating. As she put it, learning about anything from painting and poetry to physics and philosophy should not be the province of a privileged few. “Art, like science and liberty,” Michel wrote, “must be no less available than food.” To Louise Michel, education was liberation. And, in a sense, I can see now that in a quiet, easily missed-by-many way, offering so many learning opportunities to everyone who works here does just that.

Louise Michel was born in 1830 in the town of Vroncourt, in the Haute-Marne, in the northeast part of France. The daughter of a poor single mother living in a rather remote region, she loved both animals and learning from the time she was a child. In 1861, when she was 31, Michel moved to Paris, and in 1865, she opened a progressive school there. The mid-19th century was an era in which thousands of people were leaving their villages, abandoning old craft trades to take newly created-in-the-Industrial-Revolution factory jobs in cities. These were workplaces where what mattered most was one’s ability to persevere through mind-numbingly repetitive and physically challenging tasks. Wealth was created, but most of the world was worse off for it. As historian Mark Cartwright explains:

The workforce became much less skilled than previously, and many workplaces became unhealthy and dangerous. Cities suffered from pollution, poor sanitation, and crime. The urban middle class expanded, but there was still a wide and unbridgeable gap between the poor, the majority of whom were now unskilled labourers, and the rich, who were no longer measured by the land they owned but by their capital and possessions.

Writer Chip Bruce has picked up on Louise Michel’s magic. Bruce, who’s very active in a program called Democratic Education in the 21st Century, writes:

She was an early practitioner of what I’d call inquiry-based learning. She was a continual learner. … As a schoolteacher, she used methods promoted in the progressive education movement (which came much later): interaction with objects such as flowers, rocks, and animals, studies outdoors, and scientific methods. … Michel wanted students to learn to think for themselves, just as she did herself and encouraged others to do throughout her life.

Louise Michel had the radical belief that the flow of learning should be reversed. Instead of being done only for those at the top of society, Michel believed that creative education ought to be available to anyone who was interested. She imagined a future in which art, learning, and science would belong to all people, not just a privileged few. As she explained:

Genius will be developed, not snuffed out. Ignorance has done enough harm. … The arts are a part of human rights, and everybody needs them.

A century and a half or so after Louise Michel said that, there is still a great deal of wisdom in her words, wisdom that any forward-thinking 21st-century organization of any size would be able to benefit from. Classes, books, conferences, libraries … all can be made as available to people in front-line jobs as to those in formal positions of power. As Louise Michel wrote in her Memoirs, charity was not the answer. “What we do want,” she wrote, “is knowledge and education and liberty.”

Carol Sanford, who passed away a year ago this month in her mid-80s, was, I believe, as radical in the world of modern business philosophy as Louise Michel was in mid-19th-century France. Sanford, like Louise Michel and Henry Giroux, was always very direct in her criticism of mainstream practices. As she put it: “The way most companies manage their workforces is bad for business. Not coincidentally, it’s also bad for people and for democracy.”

Among the many things Sanford helped me to understand is the import of what she calls “indirect work.” While most businesses—both in Louise Michel’s era and our own—focus primarily on work that will directly and immediately impact financial results, operational effectiveness, or both, Sanford was adamant that those efforts must be accompanied by those that are wholly indirect. As she explains in her book Indirect Work:

Indirect work is inner work … It is about change inside each of us, in the ways we perceive and understand the world and our roles and responsibilities within it. … Profound change rarely comes from direct interventions in the world. Rather it comes working indirectly over time, helping people engage consciously to develop their own understanding, motivations, aspirations, and will. All sorts of human endeavors can benefit from this approach.

The kind of broad educational activity that we do here in the ZCoB is a great example of what Sanford is suggesting. It’s hard to prove exactly how a new staff member attending a class on self-management increases sales or how a sandwich maker taking a class on personal visioning will change our organization. Still, per what Carol Sanford is saying so clearly and what Louise Michel understood intuitively, I am confident that it makes a hugely meaningful difference! It helps the people who work here grow as human beings and as leaders, which in turn helps power our organization. As Sanford explains:

Development works on our ability to be awake with regard to ourselves, and this is inherently indirect. … The role of development, to cultivate the capacities for self-observation and conscious choice that enable us to show up as living, creative beings in a living creative world, to be self-determining rather than predetermined.

With Louise Michel’s words in my head, I’ve been realizing anew how important our extensive class offerings really are. And how radical it is that nearly all of these classes are offered to anyone who works here who’s interested. Henry Giroux reminds me how much impact effective education has on the greater ecosystem around us. He’s not just referring to the accumulation of knowledge. Like Louise Michel and Carol Sanford, he’s advocating for social constructs in which self-awareness, empathy, and emotional intelligence are important. As Giroux said in an interview with Julian Casablancas, lead singer of The Strokes: “I want to see people who exhibit two things—a sense of self-reflection and a sense of compassion for others.”As he reminds us, democracies “cannot survive without informed citizens.”

Conversely, I think it’s also right to state the ethical inverse: “An autocratic leader cannot stay in power when its citizens are well informed.” People who have learned to think for themselves, who value their views and the views of others, don’t want to blindly follow a boss who tells them what to do. As Louise Michel said, “The task of teachers, those obscure soldiers of civilisation, is to give the people the intellectual means to revolt.” And that, we can be sure, is not what autocratic leaders of companies or countries would want.

Over our 40-plus years in business, we’ve worked hard to support learning and education in as many ways as possible. One thing we do regularly is send ZCoBbers to various conferences over the course of the year. While we don’t, of course, send all 700 people who work here to conferences every year, we do send a pretty high percentage of people compared to a lot of organizations. The opportunity to learn and make new, creative connections can be incomparable. When I think of all the individuals I have met at conferences where I have been a speaker, it’s kind of mind-blowing. With all that in mind, I try to imagine the experiences that a 26-year-old Emma Goldman had as an up-and-coming American immigrant activist. In September of 1895, at which point she’d lived in the U.S. for about a decade, she was traveling to London to speak at an anarchist conference. After spending 10 days crossing the Atlantic on a steamship, Emma met Louise Michel, a woman who had, by reputation, inspired her for many years. Almost a quarter century earlier, Emma Goldman was a 6-year-old girl in Lithuania when Louise Michel was 41 and fighting on the barricades of the Paris Commune. At the time of the conference, Louise Michel had already had a lifetime of amazing experiences. She celebrated her 65th birthday that year.

The bright moment of the Paris Commune, which started in March of 1871, came to an end that May, when its democracy-seeking supporters were beaten back and then arrested and imprisoned by royalist forces. Writer Adam Gopnik calls it “one of the four great traumas that shaped modern France.” For a few short months, though, anarchists, socialists, and other free thinkers like Louise Michel created a free, non-hierarchically governed city that came to be called the Paris Commune. The Commune got rid of the idea of higher-ups and instead ruled, like the Serbian student movement is doing today, with elected bodies, or what the Serbians call plenums. To this day, the Paris Commune is remembered positively—along with Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War—as an effective, anarchistically oriented, on-the-ground experiment in real-life non-hierarchical governance. And Louise Michel’s courage and creative leadership became a big part of its legend.

In the final weeks of 1877, Louise Michel was put on trial in Paris for her role in the fighting for freedom with the Commune. The opening lines of the trial’s transcript are telling:

The Court. — Your age?
Louise Michel. — Forty-seven.
The Court. — Your profession?
Louise Michel. — Teacher and woman of letters.

While her emphasis on education has clearly impressed me, it did not impress the French court. Michel was convicted and sent to a Paris prison for two years, then put on a ship and sent off to the penal colony on the French-controlled island of New Caledonia. There, Michel again took up teaching, including teaching French to the indigenous Kanak people, not to “civilize” them but rather to give them a tool they could use to advocate for themselves with the French authorities. I wrote a good bit about the value of teaching a few years back, in an essay entitled “Why Leaders Should be Teachers.”

Louise Michel says education’s purpose is “the formation of free men full of respect, and love for the liberty of others.” Looking back on our collective life here in the ZCoB, it strikes me that one of the more radical, impactful things we have done to make our culture what it has come to be is teach a wide range of classes for the people who work here. These classes are, for the most part, open to anyone who wants to go. I’ve lost track of how many we offer, but there are a lot. I lead the Welcome to the ZCoB orientation regularly. There’s Intro to Visioning, where people learn how to write the story of the future they want for their personal lives, work projects, or both. There’s our most oft-taught class, The Art of Giving Great Service. We have a diversity class that we teach diligently every month. There’s a class on Servant Leadership. Two or three classes on Open Book Management. There’s another on personal finance. There’s a class called Managing Ourselves. And everyone who works here has free access to any of the 20-plus online ZingTrain Virtual Workshops. Two weeks ago, right after I had my tooth taken out, I taught the Welcome to ZCoB Governance class to go over the imperfect but very intentional democratic practices we use. These are just the classes I can come up with off the top of my head.

It is, I know, a long list, one that’s likely intimidating to anyone who is considering teaching some internal classes in their own organization. For context, though, remember that we’ve been here nearly 44 years. Even two well-run classes in a small company can make a big difference. We did not create this kind of class list in a couple of weeks. The point is not to have the longest class list in town. It’s to get started, to teach and learn, to get people thinking, to encourage them to ask questions, and to learn to think like leaders instead of waiting for direction.

Right now, this is not the popular mainstream approach. As Henry Giroux writes:

Authoritarian societies do more than censor; they punish those who engage in what might be called dangerous thinking. … Critical and dangerous thinking is the precondition for nurturing the ethical imagination that enables engaged citizens to learn how to govern rather than be governed. Thinking with courage is fundamental to a notion of civic literacy that views knowledge as central. … Thinking dangerously is not only the cornerstone of critical agency and engaged citizenship, it’s also the foundation for a working democracy.

It’s also, I would suggest, critical for creating the kind of organization we envision. Nearly all of those classes, it seems to me, are focused mainly on providing frameworks to help people learn to think for themselves and to develop their own philosophies and worldviews. Informed staff members, as I have experienced them:

• are more willing and able to engage in thoughtful conversation
• are better able to creatively and caringly question the status quo
• learn how to think systemically
• offer insights into how to improve pretty much every part of what we do
• have learned how to lead the implementation of those improvements
• get to know what good meetings are like, which means they learn how to participate effectively in a range of constructive conversations—the kind it takes to run any democratic and inclusive organization
• can handle more complexity and paradox when making decisions in difficult situations
• learn to think like leaders
• learn to self-manage, to be reflective, and to be responsive to requests
• tend to offer constructive ideas and approaches rather than just offering a critique

The impact on the country and our communities is substantial: People who learn these things at work are very likely to practice them when they go home, too. They become more active and effective citizens. They generally do not advocate autocracy. They want to think for themselves, not just blindly follow orders from above. The long-term, big-picture effect is indeed indirect, but over time, it’s hugely impactful, and to me, greatly inspirational. As Carol Sanford writes in The Regenerative Business:

Businesses that foster initiative and self-management change forever the way employees look at the world. When people spend their lives in hierarchical systems with supervisors making decisions for them, their decision-making capacity and their confidence in their own judgement weaken. They become habituated to ceding control and responsibility to authority figures. … By evolving the natural source of human creativity and responsibility, a regenerative business builds more than itself. It grows better citizens and, as a result, it builds a better nation and a better world.

What do we get out of all this? I recently asked one staff member what she thought about the fact that we teach so many classes internally. She smiled a bit and said, “I love it! It’s one of the best parts of working here! I think everyone should take as many of the classes as they can.” A coworker standing nearby who happened to overhear us chimed in, listing the various classes he’s taken, too.

Henry Giroux, who I believe is one of the most important thinkers of our era, said in an interview last year:

If I think about the future, I want to think about conditions that produce the Martin Luther Kings, the Gandhis, that produce massive movements, that produce great filmmakers, great educators, great women, great men who struggle together in a way that is self-consciously benevolent and compassionate. That’s what I want.

Creating an extensive program of internal education is not all it takes to make that happen. But it’s certainly a darned good start. A start that, as Giroux, Sanford, and Michel all highlight, will help create the conditions we need for healthy democratic engagement, both inside our companies and in the country at large! The training and learning work we do in this context today could help someone who’s currently making sandwiches or slicing salami become the next Henry Giroux, Carol Sanford, or Louise Michel. Who knows, someone who leads the work to change our country could be inspired to action by a class you start teaching two or three weeks from now. As Louise Michel says:

That something has never happened before certainly does not mean it is impossible.

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